In this study, we consider the task of generating clarification questions on informational posts.
Prior work in social computing has illustrated the rich diversity of advice-seeking behavior on social media such as Reddit [1]}, [2]}, [3]}, which leads us to focus on several popular advice-seeking forums on Reddit.
We choose the following subreddits which have a high proportion of text-only submissions, topical diversity, and where questions are frequently asked in response to the submissions: Advice, AmItheAsshole, LegalAdvice, PCMasterRace, and PersonalFinance.AmITheAsshole hosts discussions about social norms in everyday situations; Advice hosts discussions about general lifestyle decisions including work, health, and family.
We collect all submissions (\(\sim \)  8 million) to the above subreddits from January 2018 through December 2019, using a public archive (accessed February 2021) [4]}.
We filter the post data to only include submissions written in English with at least 25 words.
To identify potential clarification questions, we collect all children comments of the parent submission (\(\sim \)  6 million) that are not written by bots.
